Social Norms, Moral Judgments, and Irrational Parenting

We are all conformists, whether we admit it or not. It’s part of our human nature. We couldn’t form and live in human societies if we weren’t conformists. To a considerable degree, conformity is a good thing.

Social psychologists commonly describe two primary reasons for conformity. One reason has to do with information and pragmatics. If other people cross Bridge A and avoid Bridge B, they may know something about the bridges that we don’t know. To be safe, we had better stick with Bridge A too. A great advantage of living in society is we don’t have to learn everything by trial and error. We don’t have to try crossing Bridge B and have it collapse on us in order to learn to avoid it. We just look and see that other people avoid B and that those on A are surviving, so we take A too. This kind of social influence is referred to by social psychologists as informational influence.

The other general reason for conformity is to promote group cohesion and be accepted by others in the group. We depend for our survival and wellbeing on membership in social groups, whether they be bands, tribes, nations, friendship groups, or work groups. Social groups can exist only if some degree of behavioral coordination exists among the group members. Conformity allows a group to act as a coordinated unit rather than a set of separate individuals. We tend to adopt the ideas, myths, and habits of our group because doing so generates a sense of closeness to others, promotes our acceptance by them, and enables the group to function as a unit. We all cross Bridge A because we are the Bridge A people, and proud of it! If you cross Bridge B you may look like you don’t want to be one of us, or you may look strange and therefore possibly dangerous to us. Social influence that works through each person’s desire to be part of a group or be approved of by the group is called normative influence.

Solomon Asch’s classic experiments on conformity in the laboratory

This is all well and good, but sometimes our strong human tendency to conform can cause us to say or do things that objectively don’t make any sense. They may even be downright silly, or in some cases tragic.

Let’s start with silly, and an example from a classic series of experiments conducted by social psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s. Asch’s (1956) procedure was as follows: A college-student volunteer was brought into the lab and seated with six-to-eight other students. The group was told that their task was to judge the lengths of lines. On each trial they were shown one standard line and three comparison lines and were asked to judge which comparison line was the same length as the standard. As a perceptual task, this was absurdly easy; one comparison line was clearly the same length as the standard and the other two were clearly different in lengths. In previous tests, subjects performing the task alone almost never made mistakes. But, of course, this was not really a perceptual test; it was a test of conformity. Unbeknown to the real subject, the others in the group were confederates of the experimenter and had been instructed to give a specific wrong answer, in a confident tone of voice, during certain prearranged “critical” trials. Choices were stated out loud by the group members, one at a time in the order of seating, and seating had been arranged so that the real subject was always the next to last to respond. The question of interest was this: On the critical trials, would subjects be swayed by the confederates’ wrong answers?

Of more than 100 subjects tested, 75 percent were swayed by the confederates on at least one of the 12 critical trials in the experiment. Some of the subjects conformed on every trial, others on only one or two. On average, subjects conformed on 37 percent of the critical trials. That is, on more than one-third of the trials on which the confederates gave a wrong answer, the subject also gave a wrong answer, usually the same wrong answer as the confederates had given.

In subsequent research, Asch showed that the primary reason for conformity in this case was normative, not informational. When the experiment was varied so some of the subjects gave their responses anonymously, in such a way that others didn’t hear their judgment, there was much less conformity. Participants were much more likely to choose the correct line when nobody would know what they had chosen. If everyone around you insists that black is white, it takes considerable courage (or maybe foolishness?) for you to say, out loud, “No, that’s black, not white.”

A social norm that lasted a thousand years

Source: Flickr, labeled for reuse

Every culture has social norms, which people follow largely because of the negative consequences of appearing different. Generally, most such norms are benign, but some are harmful, even cruel. An example of the latter is Chinese foot binding.

For roughly a thousand years, beginning in the 10th century and ending in the 20th, girls in China were routinely crippled by a process of binding their feet. Beginning typically between age 4 and 6, girls’ feet were bound tightly, with increasingly tight wrappings. The binding process involved deliberately breaking the bones of the toes and other bones in the feet, and curling the broken toes underneath, so the feet grew to look more like a hoofs than like feet. The binding was done by the girl’s mother or by a woman chosen by the mother. The goal was feet no longer than 3 Chinese inches (4 American inches), which would fit within tiny silk slippers. The whole process was extremely painful and had the effect of crippling the girls. Throughout their lives they would have to walk in a mincing manner that was viewed in China at that time as the height of femininity. The process also often resulted in infections, such that many girls and women died of gangrene.

Historians suggest that this practice began, in the 10th century, when Emperor Li Yu became entranced by one of his concubines who bound her feet and danced seductively on her toes (Foreman, 2015). Other court ladies then began to bind their feet, and gradually the practice spread and became increasingly extreme. By the mid-17th century the practice was so widespread that nearly all girls and women, throughout China, had tiny hoof-like feet (Schiavenza, 2013). The only ones who didn’t were daughters in very poor families, especially among the ethnic Hakka people, where girls and women needed to work in fields or on boats at jobs that would be impossible with bound feet. Unbound feet became, therefore, a sign of being lower class, unfit for marriage to a man who was not of the lower class himself.

At various times over the course of this history campaigns were organized to try to do away with foot binding, but the social norm was so powerful that the campaigns were generally unsuccessful. It wasn’t until the 19th century, with exposure to Western ideas, that upper-class women began to stop binding their daughters’ feet, which led finally, by the early 20th century, to the extinction of this cultural practice completely.

We don’t bind our children’s feet, of course, but there are other ways in which we interfere with our children’s development. Children are by nature designed to develop physically, socially, emotionally, and intellectually largely through self-directed play and exploration with other children. Throughout most of human history, except at times of slavery or intensive child labor, children spent large portions of their time playing and exploring with other children, away from adults. This was their major source of joy and their natural way of learning how to function as independent, responsible, competent human beings. As recently as 30 or 40 years ago it was still standard practice for parents to shoo children out of the house, where they would find other children and play to their hearts’ content. Over the last few decades, however, in the United States and many other nations, social norms have gradually developed that prevent such play. As I have argued elsewhere (e.g. here and here), there are good reasons to believe that these norms of restricting children’s freedom are a major cause of the record levels of depression, anxiety, various other psychological disorders, and suicide among young people today. I’m not sure that depriving children of play is less cruel than binding their feet.

Today, strong social pressures work against any parent who understands the value of free, unsupervised play and exploration for his or her children. Here, paraphrased, is the kind of statement that I have heard from many parents (for many examples of actual cases, see Lenore Skenazy’s website):

“I know that my child needs free play, away from adults, to develop optimally. I know the data indicating that lack of such play can have crippling effects on social and emotional development. I know that the realistic dangers of such play are very small and the advantages are great. But such play is impossible today. Because other parents aren’t letting their children out to play, there’s nobody out there for my child to play with, so he just comes back inside. Or, if he is outside by himself or with another child, playing or walking anywhere outside of our yard, there’s a good chance that someone will report this to Child Protective Services or the police. Even if nobody does report it, I sense the negative judgments of other parents, who view me as negligent for not always supervising my child.”

Social norms sometimes take the form of moral imperatives, and when that happens it’s especially difficult for people to violate them. Moral judgments cloud and trump common sense. If a practice is perceived as immoral, it is perceived as wrong even if evidence and logic would dictate that the practice is beneficial. Our current norm of extreme protection of children has become, unfortunately, not just a social norm, but a moral norm. If you don’t watch your child (or have some other responsible guard watching) every minute, you are, in the eyes of many people, doing something immoral.

Recently, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, published an article illustrating how moral judgments can cloud our reasoning (Thomas et al., 2016). In their study, more than 1,500 adult participants, from various backgrounds, read stories in which a child was left alone for some period of time. For example, in one story an 8-year-old was left reading a book for 45 minutes in a coffee shop a block away from her parent. After each story, the participant was asked to rate on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) the degree of danger the child was in while the parent was away.

Remarkably, the most common danger rating for every story was 10—the most extreme danger possible—and the average was about 7. The idea that the high ratings represent, in part, an effect of moral judgment was supported by the finding that the danger ratings were significantly higher when the story indicated that the parent had deliberately left the child alone than when the story indicated that the child was left alone because of some unavoidable accident that kept the parent away. As the researchers point out, common sense would suggest that a child left alone deliberately would be safer than one left alone because of an accident, because in the former case the parent would likely have taken some precautions about safety or known that the child was mature enough to handle the time alone. The fact that the results were the reverse of common sense indicates that participants were, probably unconsciously, inflating the danger as a way of blaming the parent for violating what they perceived to be a moral imperative—that of always watching one’s child.

How can we change this crippling social norm and get back to common sense? That’s something I’ve discussed in the past (e.g. here) and will, more, in a future post. But now I’m interested in your thoughts and questions. If you are a parent, what social pressures have you experienced that led you to restrict your child in ways that you believed were objectively irrational and not good for your child? Or, if you resisted the social pressures, how did you do so? How might we, as a society, reduce our tendency to judge parents in moral terms and make common sense and real data more salient in our decisions about how to treat our children?

Source: Basic books with permission

This blog is, among other things, a forum for discussion. Please put your comments and questions here rather than send them to me by private email. I read all comments and try to respond to questions if I think I have something worth saying beyond what others have said in their responses. By putting your thoughts and questions here you will share them with other readers, not just me. I generally don’t respond to private emails that derive from blog posts.

One thing you will have noticed, if you have been following this blog, is that people who comment here are consistently respectful and courteous to one another, even when they very much disagree. I appreciate that!

Many times, I have opted out of what is the social norm . . . I pulled them out of school. We don't participate in sports. I refuse to have them take the SATs (don't want the college board to profit). Plan on going the community college route. Because of these choices, many times I find myself without a group of like minded friends.

I've seen that it's a huge problem for those of us who live in cities like New York. Its next to impossible in some areas of the city to just tell your kids to go outside and play. This is one of the main reasons I home school and bring my kids, 12 and 4, out to a small town in CT where my parents live every other week since they were born. I know how crucial it is for them to have that freedom to roam in packs with other neighborhood kids of various ages and discover on their own and learn from each other. The families in the country can't believe that in the city we have to pay for our kids to take a class in Central Park where they engage in pretend play with swords....an activity that just naturally happens in any backyard or driveway of this small town in CT.

I find it "social norm" conformity rare in the Alternatvie Education parental circles, thus, the verbiage Irrational Parenting in the title seemed harsh and I assumed would be a negative judgment towards non-conforming Alternative Education parents.

Peer pressure at all stages are and issues to juggle daily for all, specifically from top down levels with blanket power in dominator societies.

Edited post version (I didn't see an option to edit or delete my previous post, thus, the final copy without typos and more clarity is below).

Today, "marketing" is the new deliberately challenging peer pressure norm to accomplish similar influential controls.

Also, peer pressure results in the same conformity rulings.

I find "social norm" conformity rare in the Alternatvie Education parental circles, thus, the verbiage Irrational Parenting in the title seemed harsh and I assumed would be a negative judgment towards non-conforming Alternative Education parents. However, after reading the article, that's not the case.

Peer pressure at all stages are issues everyone juggles daily, specifically from top down level influencers with blanket power in dominator societies.

Fear that he will be kidnapped or something else will happen to him motivates me to not allow him to freely play outside unless I can see him from our window. He is my only child so that makes it even more difficult. Also, there are no children his age for him to play with in the neighborhood. I try to allow him to play by himself when I can (on the playground, at the bounce house,etc) when I can be sure he is in a safe environment. I agree that being overly restrictive is problematic, but unrestricted play is unrealistic for most neighborhoods the way they are set up today. I do what I can to give him as many opportunities to play on his own with other children as I can. The local playground is always a good place to allow that freedom. I think overall, parents want to keep their children sat in a world that is perceived (at least in the U.S. as being unsafe for children). I wish we lived in a neighborhood where people didn't randomly drive fast cars down the street and there were children his age to play with, but we don't. We can't allow children to play like they did 30 to 40 years ago, because we do not live 30 to 40 years in the past. We live now and the world is different. Safe small towns or large country yards are not available to everyone.

I am not sure the world is any less safe now for children than it was forty or fifty years ago. There were kidnappings back then too, and they made the news just as they do now. They made the news then and do so still now because they were and are so rare.

Relative to in the past. The 24 hours news cycle is one of the social changes. Kidnappings are actually outliers (and most of them are by family members), and the biggest threat to a child's health and welfare is from people who know that child, not strangers.

I was born in 1958, and I remember all sorts of strange things happening to children, but the news wasn't broadcast 24 hours a day to keep the emotional momentum going in the public. We were in a rural setting, and the drug use, child abuse and alcoholism were not uncommon, along with extreme poverty in a lot of families.

But experiences are relative, and if one believes that children are not safe today - then not much is going to change that perception.

Perhaps our divergent childhood experiences and perceptions were based more on our different socioeconomic situations.
...............
My dad earned a solid middle class income and back then it was enough to support his family, have one car, and enough for mother to stay at home with us before my sibling and I began elementary school. We were able to go on short vacations in the summer, visit relatives who had lake-front properties for weekend recreation. It was rather idyllic.
...............
We had the kind of safety and lifestyle that today, only those in the upper-middle-class or actually wealthy people have living in sprawling, landscaped planned, gated communities or on their own estates with security services.
...............
Now that I think about it, there are lots of families with school-age children who live in the neighborhood I live in now and whenever I see younger children (like, first grade thru fifth grade or so) they always have an adult with them. I think it's just necessary in my part of town.
...............

When I was young 11 and 12-year-old girls were excited to get clear lip gloss and didn't know anything about sex or violence. I am a teacher in a middle school outside of Atlanta. These are middle-class kids. They are so over sexualized that we had a boy removed from 7th grade for attempted rape of an eight-year-old neighbor. Most of the girls in my 8th-grade were approached for sex by boys in our school or high school age boys this year. Sending your kids out in the neighborhood to play when I was young we had to fear strangers, adults were the major predators now kids have to fear other kids. A semi-supervised play paradigm is better.

Your child is far more likely to die in a car accident while you're driving than be kidnapped by a stranger. Do you walk everywhere with him?
Kids are safer now than they've ever been. Violent crime has declined steadily since the 60s. And yet people are more afraid, not less.

I'm a 'boomer. When I was a kid I never had any of my friends or schoolmates go missing, none were whisked away by a parent during a nasty divorce, none of my friends were murdered or hit by a car. There were no creepy strangers to avoid. None of my friends or schoolmates got raped or molested or beaten up by their parents.
We lived in a middle class neighborhood where only one individual neighbor was a divorced woman with a boy a couple of years older than me. There was one widow lady, and one middle-aged childless couple, but every other house on my street for 10 houses on either side of us were intact, two parent homes with kids close to me in age. A police officer and his family lived right next door to us; his two kids were older than me but we sometimes played together. We never locked our door. I roamed around alone in summer ALL DAY and I walked home alone from school often. My mother had no idea where I was half the time, but if a parent did that now, in the area I live in now, it would be very foolish and dangerous.

Respectfully, you are consistently proving the point of what Dr. Gray stated in the article. You seem fixated on the idea that the social norm that was your reality growing up is the only condition under which kids should be allowed to have the kind of freedom you enjoyed as a child. I am happy that you felt so safe and free. But just because no one you knew "got raped, molested, or beat up by their parents" doesn't mean that those tragedies didn't occur in the time when you grew up, perhaps even in your idyllic neighborhood. And conversely, just because neighborhoods look different now it does not follow that they are significantly less safe for children. Dr. Gray's body of work is about the importance of freedom for children's development. What I took away from this article in particular was to check my own sense of "social norm" against the current reality of any given situation before putting undue limits on my kids' freedom to explore the world. Yes, bad things can happen to children--and to adults, and to the elderly, and to anyone in society. But fear in the face of all evidence of safety is not the way to prevent tragedies from occurring.

To me you and Dr. Gray seem to be the ones wearing rose-colored glasses when looking at today's much-altered environment and it's you who are not seeing reality.
..........
I have had to step over a body when leaving my parking garage, didn't know if he was dead or not, called it in to the police. I have been aggressively panhandled by a guy who wouldn't take no for a answer. I have been solicited by a man who apparently thought I was a prostitute. These things happened at or within a block of my own home.
..........
I and two of my meighbors heard blood-curdling screaming coming from the building across the street one evening, called the police, and a woman was brought out on a stretcher; the perp got away.
..........
Oh, and the young children across the street who were screaming in terror several times a day that I could hear even even through my closed windows and theirs: I started keeping a log noting the dates, time of day, whether it was the baby or one of the other children screaming, whether the mother could be heard yelling/screeching or objects heard crashing, and I kept the log for a month. Then I called CPS.
After another two weeks or so passed, I noticed that these children were being allowed outside more often with (I'm guessing) a nanny with them, watching them; mommy stayed indoors. And the hair-raising screaming of the children virtually ceased.
..........
So, no. The idyllic, safe neighborhoods and undeveloped land I roamed in as a child and teen aren't here. They probably never existed here, in this satillite community of a gigantic city. I never saw a used heroin needle in the gutter or hookers plying their trade or groups of jobless men drinking in their front courtyard until I moved here, for my job. If you consider that "a safe place" to let young children or young teens wander around in unsupervised, then I really do wonder about your perception of reality.

I don't think it's fair to compare lack of being able to roam freely as equivalent to foot binding. My child may not roam freely around the neighborhood with bands of children, but he is a happy child and I am not abusing him by trying to keep him safe. Also please consider the fact that people have less children these days. Back in the 1950s it was the norm to have 8-10 kids. When you have less children, you tend to be more restrictive because if your progeny only includes one child then you only have one chance. If your child dies that is it for your genetic future. I don't have any studies to site, but just a possibility to consider. I don't think it is all about conforming to social norms.

Also, having less kids equals less children roaming around the average neighborhood. We simply cannot compare the world the way it is now to the way things were 30-40+ years ago. This issue is far more complicated than simple social conformity.

This is something that comes to my mind when reading this article:
When my eldest daughter was about one and a half years old I was constantly asked if she shouldn be attending daycare to 'socialise'. In observing her needs I saw nothing that warranted it. Interaction with adults and older kids was a thing she clearly enjoyed, but when put together with children her own age there was no observable interest, except maybe to grab the other kid's toy.
I felt that a small child should be near its parents to form a proper attachment, to feel safe and to be met in its needs, which the parent is, ideally of course, best equipped to do.
I had the luck of having parents who support this wholeheartedly, so despite peer pressure and pressure from my inlaws I had a place to turn to for assurance and confirmation. My father delighted in seeing my girl 'anchor' as he calls it, meaning that she went out exploring the delights of the world and coming back when things got a bit scary or she got tired.
I thought it was very strange that explain though I did, many people around us just didn't understand this choice. They expected me to get a job and leave the main care of my child in the hands of a paid professional, especially because I identify as feminist and childcare is heavily subsidized.
One of the recurring comments was: "I'd go crazy if I had to spend every day with my kid(s)", leading to me explaining that I spent most of my days doing my own things, only playing with my little one if she had a need of me. This generated a lot of weird looks coming my way. There is this general assumption that children need constant stimuli in order to develop properly, and I was clearly not offering that.
Most people don't know that sleeping is not sufficient rest to adequately incorporate the lessons/skills learned during the day. In trying to point this out, with the emphasis on offering a child the ability to choose its own moment to withdraw, disengage, ponder, sleep, etc, I was usually met with the old addage that a child has to learn to conform to other people's schedules/rules/expectations.

Why? Really, why? Usually I try to get the other person to explain this to me, so they have to be concious of their reasoning. It never gets beyond the idea that it's hard for kids to conform if they haven't been taught at an early age. Conforming to society is considered some holy grail, and failing to do so seen as a threat. When you then suggest that maybe this society isn't something you should automatically conform to, but something to be looked at critically, changed, opened up, diverted or, yes, conformed to in certain points when deemed desireable, logical or easiest, you will not escape the looks of pity and/or disgust.
How dare you place such a burden on the shoulders of your children...
I've met just a handful of people who get this when they aren't already partly 'outside looking in'. Get the idea that parents like me are trying to actually offer choice in this and many other regards instead of demanding they shoulder the task of propping up a structurally unsound society unconditionally, unquestioningly.

There are a few points that occur to me:

Children grow up feeling unsafe. Limited parental contact, stranger care and repeated admonitions about the dangers 'out there'.
At the same time controlled environments with little or no change or challenge increase the fear of unknowns and thus dampen curiosity. Also it lessens the development of sense of responsibility. There are no: younger children, breakables and dangers.
There is no emphasis on instilling divergent skills that are widely applicable to problem solving.
The normal development of sensing your own limits is severly hampered when, from baby age onwards, your limits are set by another person/persons. Usually this also counts for other people's limits.

Children that have been raised in that manner are those I keep an eye on when they are playing with my kids, while usually I only come looking when I hear a certain screaming or when I'm just contentedly observing the fun of their play.

Fortunately we've been blessed with a wonderful homeschooling community in which most parents opt for unschooling. This ensures playmates that are well suited for our kids. They might not be able to do so every day, but I'd rather have high quality play time for them a few times a month than subject them to the daily struggle of trying to sustain some limited autonomy in a school system that doesn't take their natures into account just because 'that is what everyone does'.

I still get the (often quite rude and judgmental) questions about socialisation and schooling, but seeing my girls thrive as social creatures that are open, comfortable with nearly everyone, curious and playful, makes it possible for me to answer calmy, confidently and patiently.
It already has brought around several people who thought we were completely insane to at least accept our position as valid.

This and more of this. Agree 100%. Also want to add in response to other comments that today's society is not the same as it was. My neighborhood is empty all day long into the evening. Both parents work nowadays which is usually required or seen as necessary so kids are shuttled off to day care as babies then into school. Then there's after school care until parents get off work at 5 or so. Then hours of homework. Kids aren't outside playing in the neighborhood because it's mostly logistically impossible.

I love more than anything parents who are intelligent not just intellectually but emotionally, ethically, socially and emotionally. I find the children of parents such as these to be equally delightful, fun, intrigueing and well behaved!

Nevertheless, children will be children, and there just needs be a barometer between hyper fear control and "Lord of the Flys."

Just look at the differences in folks who have commented here. Yup. Tru dat. A very diverse crowd indeed! Yet, hiw heartening that we all are passionate about thiz subject. Our desire to do right by our children brought us together here. And that is a beautiful thing, don't you think? I think also that a confident parent by far is a true treasure to their child. We are blessed still to live in a free country. There are so many opportunities for our children, still. There is certainly hope to be free of a policing state.

When I was a kid, age about 8 to 12, there were no Cel phones for my mother to keep track of where I was and I pretty much wandered around by myself all summer, either on my bike or on foot, when I wasn't playing at a friend's house.
....................
But I was a kid in the mid-1950s. I lived in a bedroom community of a mid-sized city.
....................
My middle-class suburb was populated by families who were nearly cookie-cutter identical to my family: white-collar dad, stay at home mom, white, Anglo Saxon Protestant. Intact two-parent homes.
....................
There were no prostitutes or drug-addicted homeless people anywhere within 40 miles of our town. There were no bars, no liquor for sale in our county (several counties around ours were dry as well.) No stores were open on Sunday.
....................
As far as I was aware as a child there were no "strange men" that I was told I needed to stay away from. There weren't groups of unemployed men loitering in our tiny downtown, smoking and drinking. Nobody I knew, nobody's dad or brother, was ever arrested or locked up; no domestic violence shattered the tranquility of our street. No murders. No pedophile child rapists.
.....................
That was a different time. Nobody even locked their door. Times are different now.
......................
If I was a parent of a 8 to 18 year old child these days would I let him or her wander around completely unsupervised like I did? Oh, hell no!
....................
That's because everything I listed about my childhood town and neighborhood is different where I live now: it's packed with densely-populated apartment and condo buildings, the streets have heavy traffic, and there are many single-parent households (latch-key kids.)
...............
The only nearby park has a significant, seemingly permanent drug-addict homeless population (used needles everywhere). Liquor is available every day, on pretty much every block.
...............
Police don't arrest the prostitutes, their johns, or keep the homeless druggies from camping out on private property, let alone public property.
Loitering is apparently not a crime anymore. ...............
Children and teens walking to and from school are likely to be panhandled or approached by a child molester if unescorted by an adult. (I looked it up: there are convicted sex offenders scattered in apartment buildings around my town, even though some were convicted of raping minors some live in my neighborhood where there are several public and private schools.)
....................
So, no. It would be totally irresponsible of me as a parent to let my minor child wander around my town and it's neighborhoods unsupervised these days.
....................

I suspect many people have quite sanitized memories of their childhoods. I did live in rural areas, so I did have plenty of free roaming. But farming accidents were fairly common and could be serious, accidents with hunting guns happened, kids had broken arms and legs and concussions.. there were bums and we were taught to leave them alone but not to be terrified of them. Children were molested- by neighbors and teachers and family members, but it was usually hardly spoken of. Women were in abusive relationships- and they put on makeup and pretended it wasn't happening. I am pretty sure that statistically even in poor urban neighborhoods with high rates of gun violence the risk of harm to children is not any higher, and probably less than it was in the 80s. Cars are safer, streets are safer, playgrounds are safer, protective equipment is far better.

I live in a large city. It is very difficult to allow small children much independence. When I let my preschooler run ahead of me down the sidewalk, confident that he will stop well before the street, regularly some other mother or grandmother will stop him, looking horrified and glaring at me for my obvious negligence. I do try small things, like letting them play in the tiny back yard or on the front porch by themselves. I let them walk down the street and around the corner to their aunt's house- but I feel I must stand out on the sidewalk so that no one thinks they have no supervision! It's frustrating!

This was my experience growing up in a rural area,. The kids seem to live now in a very safe way, relative to earlier times. Farming accidents, accidental shootings during hunting season especially on opening day of the season, beatings from fathers, and poverty and drugs were all part and parcel of a rural setting (although my family did not experience with firsthand and I never touched drugs or alcohol), but I attended a school where many of many of my rural (mostly farmers kids) classmates were abused, early pregnancies, etc.

Sarah, I think you are 100 percent right. The days when all the kids roamed weren't halcyon, and I have had the same experience where other parents/people in public think I am being neglectful when intentionally giving children freedom.

I currently have 5 children. My eldest has cerebral palsy, which makes him physically unstable, but he can walk. Three of my 5 children were my sister's. She passed away and her husband is a drug addict, unable to care for them, but unstable mentally. I have concerns about letting Alex go play with all the kids, because I worry about him getting hurt. I also worry about the biological father of my sister's kids showing up and trying to take them back to hurt me. He does know where I live. If I just take them to a park and kind of ignore them... is that sufficient? I usually take them on a hike and get messy with them, like skipping stones and creek walking. I want them safe, but always exploring. I feel, at least in my case, the threats of harm for them is slightly higher.

We live in a rural community in the northeast. We have tongue in cheek commented for years that we are free range parents. Our kids have been raised with a sense of responsibility and independence that seems rare today. They run around on bikes all summer fishing at hidden ponds from sun up to sun down. Snow mobiles in the winter, 4 wheelers, horses and lots of crazy experiments. Life as it should be for a kid. I couldn't imagine it any other way.

I was born and raised in a different country. My family and I lived in an apartment complex of a big city, close to a street where people would go at speeds of 50 miles per hour. My parents, just like everyone elses, would let us go outside (after we had eaten and done homework) and we would roam completely freely for hours at a time. My mom would warn me what to look out for, not to talk to suspicous strangers and so forth. There were creeps occasionally, but the word would spread fast and we'd avoid them. In school, even elementary, we did not have any adult supervision at the playground. We were also free to leave. Numerous times I had ran back home during recess (barely making it) to fetch homework I had forgotten. Needless to say, everyone I know has developed their street smarts on top of being book smart, which was a major requirement in every family. I cannot even begin to describe my shock after I had my kids here in the US, at how children are treated here. In school (I substitute), they are treated like prisoners. Time without adult supervision i.e. gree play is virtually non existant. I try to give my children as much freedom as I can. They go around and roam freely when there is other children around. Sadly it doesn't happen remotely as much as it should, though I am happy to say it does happen. Intuitively I always knew that side of growing up is incredibly important. All you can do is give your children guidance and let them go. It is a lot healthier to start gradually. Of course safety might be an issue, but, speaking from personal experience, a group of kids is waaaaay smarter than we give them credit for, and they look after one another. But they have to be given a chance. In our case it is not social norms that hold us back, but the availability of company.

I find that a lot of people parent with great fear. They fear what will happen to their child if they don't do certain things, they fear their child getting hurt, they fear facing the judgement of others. From "if I don't get my child into the best preschool, he'll never get into a good college and he'll fail at life" to "If I don't watch my child every second, someone could take him," parents act out of fear.

I see it at the playground. I let my child explore playground, jump off things, swing from things, make friends, and run free. I am nearby in case he needs me (usually only to hold his coat). I have seen other parents say to him "Oh, be careful!" when he does things or even ask "Where are your parents?" (he is black and I am white, so they might not see an adult that "matches").

I once saw a woman the playground literally following two preschool kids around saying "Don't run. Be careful. Stop. I said no running. Watch out! No running." There was such fear in her voice. I felt so sorry for those children as my son ran freely around having fun. I felt badly for her, too, because she seemed miserable, so afraid.

I have made choices myself out of fear. I breastfed my adopted son and my bio son, but I stopped doing so in public once they were two because I was afraid someone might call CPS and I would have to deal with their scrutiny of my parenting, and who knows what they would think. As a single mom who is unconventional (unschooling, adoptive breastfeeding, natural term breastfeeding/child-led weaning, co-sleeping...), I don't want to deal with CPS.

In my experience, other adults tend to judge parents more than help them. Rather than watching over a child left in a car while a parent runs into the store for a gallon of milk, they call the police. Rather than walking an unattended child home or watching over them from a distance as they walk home, they call the police. Rather than offering advice when they see a concern, they call the police. That sort of behavior just feeds the fear parents feel in public.

I don't know what the solution is. I would not call the police myself (unless there was an immediate emergency), but for many people, that is the go-to thing to do as they judge another parent's choice.

The history of feet binding in China is horrific, but I lived only a few years ago in a lower class community in a slum area of Cairo where FGM is still very much practiced and is indeed the norm. The females that discovered that I had not undergone this vile procedure where horrified and told me that if an Egyptian girl is not "cut" she would not only never get a husband but would bring huge shame on her family to the extent that her other siblings might not even find themselves able to marry, both men and women.
Mothers and Aunts perform this procedure to their young women at around age 6 - 9, and it is my knowledge that this practice is common across the middle east and has followed people that have migrated to the rest of the world. It is happening here in the UK. This is NOT a religious act, it is a social one.

I wish you all the best of courage in your journeys pursuing what you know to be right in your children's lives rather than blindly following the social norms. We will always be judged and frowned upon by the majority, but in that we should find strength. Much love xoxo

it's so sad that people still practice such things. Male genital mutilation is a social norm, too, but mainly only in Muslim countries, Jewish communities, and the US. Thankfully, it is declining in the US and is now slightly below 50% for infant boys. FGM is illegal already in the US, and one day MGM may be, too.

It's kind of disturbing to realize that the worst, most life-altering and most excruciating painful mutilations of the body are more often inflicted on little girls.
...............
Crippling foot-binding, unsanitary, hideous genital mutilation (I read somewhere that it makes normal sex painful, normal childbirth impossible, and it's done to make the orifice as tiny as possible for the husband's pleasure).
...............
Then there are the sub-Saharan cultures that force women to distort their shoulder and clavicle bones by wearing increasing numbers of neck rings, and other cultures that permanently stretch and distort the girl's lips with increasingly larger wooden plates.
....................
It reinforces the whole idea of women as property or that women must compete for men which is the same as devaluing women.
...............
Even in India today the families of marriageable girls must buy her a husband, which leads in a disturbing number of incidents to "serial widower bridegrooms" whose new wife dies "mysteriously" in a kitchen fire accident. The new widower apparently gets to keep the dowry of his deceased bride but he is now available to put himself back in the market for a new bride's dowry. Sickening.
...............
It's just sickening, really, what has been done and is still being done to children and to women in the name of "beauty" or for religious reasons, that can literally cripple them for life.
....................
We need to evolve past truly sadistic and harmful ancient cultural and religious customs and stop practicing them just because they are "tradition".
...............
A lot of "time-honored traditions" really suck; so it's time to just stop doing them already.

I am an American. I was recently in a major northern Italian industrial city where one afternoon I observed the stark contrast in parenting styles between Americans and Italians.

At one table were American parents with two children, a girl who I judged to be a tween, and a boy who appeared to be in his middle teens. The American parents ordered for their kids, and ordered simple pasta with meatballs, not even giving the children the opportunity to look at the menu (in English). When the food arrived, the mother insisted on cutting up the kids' pasta and meatballs for them. When the boy protested, his mother admonished him that he was not to touch his knife, that it was too dangerous, and she complained to the father that she couldn't believe that the restaurant would give "a child" a knife.

Contrast that with the Italian families, where the kids chose their own food from the menu, and when they were too young to read the menu, usually an older sibling would show them the menu and read it to them, with every kid picking what they wanted to eat. And, there wasn't any "kids menu" either -- the children choose from exactly the same menu as their parents. When the food arrived, the Italian kids cut up their own food, and in the European style, typically held a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, not putting either down except to pause in eating.

The American mom was clearly horrified by the way the Italian kids were eating, and I could overhear several comments along the lines of "its a miracle someone doesn't get stabbed the way they wave those knives around," and "someone's going to loose a finger eating like that."

I saw the same American family later that afternoon walking down the city sidewalk and, from the parental conversation, obviously headed to the same subway station I was. The mother made the daughter hold her hand at all times. The mother and daughter generally walked in front, the boy behind the mother-daughter, and the father behind him. Whenever they came to a street -- even a narrow single-lane alley with no traffic, the mother made her son hold his father's hand while crossing the street. When boarding the subway, the mother actually picked up the daughter and lifted her into the subway car, telling her "I don't want you falling down the gap and getting killed." Oh, and the gap was probably less than three inches wide, and even lacked the "mind the gap" warnings you see on most subway systems.

In contrast, the Italian kids were often out and about, more often than not, without parents. Kids knew how to buy and validate subway and bus passes, and rode public transit seemingly where ever they pleased. I never once saw a kid not properly crossing a street on their own, even four and six lane city streets. Even older toddlers seldom held their parents hands crossing streets, although some would grab onto their parents clothes while crossing.

And school buses? Forgetaboutit. Even primary school kids ride public transit buses to school.

Traveling in Europe it always amazes me the contrast between European kids and American kids. The European kids are independent, confident, social, polite, and well behaved. When you see kids acting out in public in Europe, you can almost certainly guarantee they are tourist kids. The contrast is simply stark. I know no other way to describe it.

And no one in Europe is going to call the police because a kid is walking down the sidewalk, riding public transit, or buying a soda in a cafe with no parent in sight. They simply trust their kids to stay safe and do the right thing.

In Bristol, England (a sizeable city) a few streets at the weekend are blocked off by parents so that cars cannot enter & the kids can roam the streets. It is accepted locally that this is "a thing" so people don't start going ballistic about not being able to enter the street for parking etc. I'm not sure how they square this up with the local police but Bristol is a very liberal minded place....

Our world is DRASTICALLY different from even 30 years ago folks. The white elephant here that no one seems to feel relevant is the INTERNET. In the renaissance era our world was forever changed by the invention of the printing press; for the first time in history information was accessible collectively on a large scale throughout Europe. And anyone who remembers studying this on college, what was the most obvious change in art? The obsession of the naked human body in sculpture and paint. Bosch's paintings depicting heaven and hell would be considered perverse and pornographic today and yet in the upper echelons of our society he is revered as one of our most sacred, gifted and prolific artists. Think. How is this relevant.... Once you have opened the portal to accepting, embracing...even extolling the virtues of violence, nudity, perversity and horror on a massive scake than the classic towel has indeed been thrown in. Up until even thirty years ago this acceptance of immorality was tempured by a strong religious community. Now, for the first time in HISTORY, immorality has hit an all time high, vastly different from anything, ever, before. How? The INTERNET. Like a frog that sits in a pot of water... will slowly die if you gradually increase the heat until it boils. Why doesn't the frog jump out? Because every increase of temperature is absorbed and adjusted for into his skin do that when he is boiling to death he doesn't know it. That is what the informational age has done to our world. Were children stolen, raped and killed hundreds of years ago? Maybe. I don't know. But the very IDEA of it happening, even thirty years ago was HORRIFYING. Remember the MILK CARTONS??? That is the first official "printing press invention" that solidified the LOST CHILD PARADIGM. That was the temperature increase. Now, let us fast forward to 2017. LOSING A CHILD TO A STRANGER BY ABDUCTION IS SO COMMON WE HAVE AN APP IN OUR PHONE NATIONALLY KNOWN AS AN AMBER ALERT.

Why is NO ONE TALKING ABOUT THIS WHITE ELEPHANT?

Furthermore, children NEVER BEFORE had to question THEIR SEXUALITY.

Things have changed folks. Wake up and smell the coffee. We are NEVER going back to that time of innocence. From here on out, free play is controlled, contrived and imagined.

Even as I am typing this there are children as young as 5 or 6 yeats old playing Xbox with their older siblings on an INTERNATIONAL INTERNET GAME where your imoji friend could be 65 years old. Violence, cussing, raping, pillaging and so on and so forth. Oh. And you want thrm to go outside and Play???? They don't even WANT TO. Do, how do we change this???

You all know I am touching just the very tip of the iceburg folks.

I am hoping for a moral rebirthing for our nation.

And the BIGGEST WHITE ELEPHANT in the room is our CREATOR.

I believe we have one true God who has given us free will. I believe that those of us who can make a difference for good, must.

I am so thankful for this blog snd am grateful to participate.

P.S. I let me children play outside unsupervised. My oldest son is a Marine and his siblings are thriving as well. I love my neighborhood and our our churches. One of my daughters won an award for gallying her friends in a local bske sale for the hurricane victims. For now, life is good, for us.

You're talking about something else entirely. The VAST majority of those reported missing turn up in a matter of hours or days. A second category: runaways. A third category: kids who get taken by a parent who doesn't have custody.

Kids who are abducted by perfect strangers? Not even a dozen cases per year, in the U.S., but THAT's the category we're considering when we discuss whether we should allow our children to play outside unsupervised.

We are a homeschooling family in western Washington state. When we began, my middle child was just beginning kindergarten and we didn't know anyone who was homeschooling. It was easy to do, but in some ways it was hard. People often asked how long we planned to homeschool or when we would put our children in "real" school.

I found an all homeschooled Cub Scout Pack. The families are wonderful. We made friends there, with people from like-minded families. That was seven years ago, and every friend we have can be traced back to our inclusion in this all homeschooled Cub Scout Pack.

Well my youngest son just graduated out of Cub Scouts. His entire den of boys moved on to the same Boy Scout Troop. All of them, except my son.

Boy Scouts has changed. They no longer are an organization that I feel can adequately teach morals to my son or keep him safe when I'm not with him.

When we announced we would not be moving with the rest of the den, there was shock. The former den leader and one of the other moms spent time texting me, trying to convince me to change my mind. There were many tears shed, mostly my own. My son misses seeing his friends in this group every week. It's safe to say this was one of the most difficult decisions we have ever made as parents.

It has been extremely difficult to stick to the decision of our family to leave Boy Scouts of America. All our friends are still there. We now have to try to plan other things to get together with our friends and that can be hard to do with everyone's different schedule.

We are working on being involved in other activities with new people, too.

Dawn, look for a Trail Life group near you. It was started by former Boy Scouts who wanted to go back to the traditional character/moral aspect of Boy Scouts. They partner with American Heritage Girls and with all the new changes at Boy Scouts, new troops are springing up all over.

My six year old joined a troop and at least 3/4 of the families involved are homeschooling families. It is only 20 minutes form our house in the next town over.

All Trail Life leaders are Christian, but boys of any faith/no faith are allowed to join and participate.

Trail Life has a website where you can search for local troops. IF there is not one close enough, look into getting one started.

The description of the Italian parenting (much less controlling) sounds like the way my younger sib and I were raised back in 50's-60's America in a bedroom community of a large city in the Deep South.
..........Our town was very "homogenized". We were all practically related to each other; turned out that when we moved to a more upscale neighborhood my new friend next door's mom had dated my uncle when they were in high school.
..........
Our neighborhood was safe. No burglaries, no murders, no domestic violence. No homeless people, no prostitutes. No school violence. No heroin addicts. No children I knew ever went missing. We didn't lock our doors.
..........
Back then the mentally ill homeless were institutionalized, there were no bars or liquor stores (it was a dry county) so there were no public drunks. Wandering vagrants were escorted out of town by the police.
There were no "houses of ill repute" in our county.
..........
I was allowed to spend all day Saturdays or all summer just wandering around on my bike, exploring, all alone.
..........
My recollection of the change in the feeling that we were all safe was when President Kennedy was asassinated. It all kind of went downhill after that.
..........
And yes, when the missing kids on milk cartons campaign began, that sent a chill through the nation that had a seriously negative impact on the assumption that we were all safe.
..........
When you live in a community where few people even know each other, where there is a high turnover of residents, where there are many languages spoken so you can't even talk with some of your neighbors: a neighborhood where you sometimes hear gunfire and police helicopters hovering overhead, a neighborhood where there is high unemployment so there are a lot of unemployed men just loitering and drinking outside, a lot of panhandlers, a lot of homeless drug addicts living in the public park, and the police do nothing to relocate such individuals, and don't seem to care if prostitutes are working openly on the city streets, where there are home invasion robberies and domestic violence incidents and street racing, then no, that is NOT the kind of place that I as a parent would let any child or teen of mine just wander around alone unsupervised.
..........
That would be a serious dereliction of my responsibility as a parent.
..........
It's a whole different culture in America now, than it was when I was growing up.

We are an unschooling family in a small New Zealand city. While there are a lot of families on our street, we almost never see children. We live within a short walk of 4 playgrounds which are always empty, so sending the kids out to play is not much fun for them. I think it is not just fear but also economics - parents have to work so a lot of kids stay at school in the afternoons in child-care programmes. Also there's the belief children need a lot of extra-curricula lessons, so schooled kids are rarely available for play.

Our solution is to get together with other unschooling families at least a couple of days a week in a location where the kids can go off exploring and play freely without excessive supervision. Sometimes we go camping together or to beaches, forests or just someone's backyard. The kids really seem to crave this sort of social experience and I know mine are easier to live with when they are getting enough of it.

Our group is still quite young with the oldest child being 9, but I hope as they grow they will start to initiate their own adventures together.

It was difficult to begin with to find other families who were open to letting their kids take any risks but it seems now more and more people are interested in what we're doing.

Great article! Coincidentally, I was just this morning in a conversation with my brother which I feel is related to this subject. My nephew is choosing which subjects to take over the next 2 years at school, which will go on to be his final exam subjects. He wanted to choose an extra language, but my brother intervened and forced him to take another subject as it's not common for someone to take three languages. It's my view that children should be left to choose their own education, with the teacher/parent providing support and resources, but the formal education system in most (if not all) countries dictates that all children sit in a classroom and get lectures before taking an exam. Anyone seen to be doing otherwise is often criticised, even though home and alternative schooling is shown to produce better performing students. It's another way in which conformity holds us from achieving our potential.

Thank you for the awakening. Your article is very inspiring. I guess the problem that we have has to do basically with how we are dealing with technology. It is time consuming and energy consuming too. We'd rather see our kids at home watching tv for hours or playing with electronic devices and it feel safe that they're doing so. Instead of encouraging them to go out for picnics, take trips, go hiking, we are conditioning them to stay indoors because most of the parents don't bother to go out and play with their children. They prefer to stay hooked on their screens.

Eventually this is affecting kids, and they kids are naturally influenced by their parent's behavior, choices, and attitudes. We are unfortunately raising a lazy generation focusing more on the intellectual achievements and ignoring social skills that are basically acquired through play and interaction with other kids.

I have been living abroad and traveling with my (seven) children for the past ten years. We've lived in Central America, India, Morocco and Europe. I've noticed that it's in the more developed countries where parents are the most paranoid about leaving their children alone. In Guatemala I finally left my children alone for the first time when my oldest was 10 years old -- because parents around me were leaving their 6, 7, and 8 year olds alone while they worked. In Germany I was afraid to leave them alone even though my oldest was then 13 -- we were surrounded not only by the German people, but by military Americans (we are also American). We plan on returning to the United States to live for awhile, but my children have not been there for over 6 years, and this issue is one of my biggest concerns -- how will other parents view our free-range family? Will I get 'turned in' or tattled on because my children are so independent?

I have always seemed out "working class" neighborhoods when moving to a new area. Affordable housing, sidewalks, younger families, and if I had a picture of my front yard any day of the week, you could see 10-30 kids, bikes, scooters and kids arguing, laughing and everything else. My point is- these neighborhoods STILL exist- you just need to find them. However, I still worry about CPS because you never know who may have a problem with that many kids out running. The other point is that when there is a lot of them- nobody is going to kidnap or molest a kid pulled out of a group of kids that large. However, I have had family and friends discourage this and worry. Those family and friends that think of this negatively all have one thing in common- they watch everyday mass media news. Turn OFF regular govt controlled television- it's NOT reality! Do it for a year and see if your views change.

Standard childrearing practices are a good example of harmful norms, but far from the best. Please consider that nearly every American knows that burning petroleum is causing catastrophic climate change that is likely to limit the long term prospects for human survival, yet most continue to drive cars. This behavior pattern is only a few generations old and has always faced sensible resistance, still the norm is to use an unsafe, inefficient mode of transport.